A
list of the half dozen most important figures in the early history of
economics would have to include David Ricardo; it might well include
Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill. A similar list for geology would
include William Smith and James Hutton. For biology it would surely
include Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, for physics Isaac Newton.

Who were they?
Malthus and Darwin were clergymen, Mendel a monk, Smith a mining
engineer, Hutton a gentleman farmer, Mill a clerk and writer, Ricardo
a retired stock market prodigy. Of the names I have listed, only
Newton was a university professor – and by the time he became a
professor he had already come up with both calculus and the theory of
gravitation.

There were important
intellectual figures in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early
nineteenth centuries who were professional academics – Adam Smith,
for example. But a large number, probably a majority, were amateurs.
In the twentieth century, on the other hand, most of the major
figures in all branches of scholarship have been professional
academics. Most started their careers with a conventional course of
university education, typically leading to a PhD degree.

Why did things
change? One possible answer is the enormous increase in knowledge.
When fields were new, most scholars did not need access to vast
libraries.1
There were not many people in the field, the rate of progress was not
very rapid, so letters and occasional meetings provided adequate
communication. As fields developed and specialization increased, the
advantages of the professional – libraries, laboratories,
colleagues down the hall – became increasingly important.

Email is as easy as
walking down the hall. The web, while not a complete substitute for a
library, makes enormous amounts of information readily available to a
very large number of people. In my field and many others it is
becoming common for the authors of scholarly articles to make their
datasets available on the web so that other scholars can check that
they really say what the article claims they say.

An alternative
explanation for the shift from amateur to professional scholarship is
that it was due to the downward spread of education. In the
eighteenth century, someone sufficiently well educated to invent a
new science was likely to be a member of the upper class, hence had a
good chance of not needing to work for a living. In the twentieth
century, the correlation between education and wealth was a good deal
weaker.

We are not likely to
return to the class society of eighteenth-century England. But by the
standards of that society, most educated people today are rich –
rich enough to make a tolerable living and still have time and effort
left to devote to their hobbies. For a large and increasing fraction
of the population, amateur scholarship, like amateur sports, amateur
music, amateur dramatics, and much else, is a real option. These
arguments suggest that, having shifted from a world of amateur
scholars to a world of professionals, we may now be shifting back.
That conjecture is based in large part on my own experiences. Two
examples:

Robin Hanson is
currently a professor of economics at George Mason University. When I
first came into (virtual) contact with him, he was a NASA scientist
with an odd hobby. His hobby was inventing institutions. His ideas –
in particular an ingenious
proposal to design markets to generate
information
– were sufficiently novel and well thought out to make
corresponding with him more interesting than corresponding with most
of my fellow economists. They were sufficiently interesting to other
people to get published. Eventually he decided that his hobby was
more fun than his profession and went back to school for a PhD in
economics.

One of my hobbies
for the past thirty years has been cooking from very early cookbooks;
my earliest source is a letter
written in the sixth century by a Byzantine physician named Anthimus
to Theoderic, king of the Franks. When I started, one had to pretty
much reinvent the wheel. There were no translations of early
cookbooks in print and very few in libraries. Almost the only
available sources in English, other than a small number of unreliable
books about the history of cooking, were a few early English
cookbooks – in particular a collection that had been published by
the Early English Text Society in 1888. I managed to get one
seventeenth-century source by finding a rare book collection that had
a copy of the original and paying to have it microfilmed.

The situation has
changed enormously over the past thirty years. The changes include
the publication of several reliable secondary sources, additional
English sources, and a few translations – all of which could have
happened without the internet. But the biggest change is that there
are now at least seven English translations of early cookbooks on the
web,2
freely available to anyone interested, as well as several early
English cookbooks. Most of the translations were done by amateurs for
the fun of it. There are hundreds of worked out early recipes (the
originals usually omit inessential details such as quantities, times,
and temperatures) webbed. There is an email list that puts anyone
interested in touch with lots of experienced enthusiasts. Some of the
people on that list are professional cooks, some are professional
scholars. So far as I know, none is a professional scholar of cooking
history.

Similar things are
happening in other areas. I am told that amateur astronomers have
long played a significant role because skilled labor is an important
input to star watching. There seems to be an increasing amount of
interaction between historians and groups that do amateur historical
recreation – sometimes prickly, when hobbyists claim expertise they
don’t have, sometimes cordial. The professionals, on average, know
much more than the amateurs do, but there are a lot more amateurs and
some of them know quite a lot. And the best of the amateurs have
access not only to information but to each other, as well as to any
professional more interested in the ability of the people he
corresponds with than their credentials.

OPEN
SOURCE SOFTWARE

Amateur
scholarship is one example of the way in which rising incomes and
improved communication technology make it easier to produce things
for fun. Another is open source software.

The best-known
example is Linux,3
a computer operating system. The original version was created by a
Finnish graduate student named Linus Torvalds.
Having done a first draft himself, he invited everyone else in the
world to help improve it. A lot of them accepted – with the result
that Linux is now a sophisticated operating system, widely used for a
variety of different tasks. Another open source project, the Apache
web server, is the software on which a majority of world wide web
pages run.

When you buy a copy
of Microsoft Word you get the object code, the version of the program
that the computer runs. With an open source program, you get the
source code, the human readable version that the original programmer
wrote and that other programmers need if they want to modify the
program. You can compile it into object code to run it, but you can
also modify it and then compile and run your new version of the
program.

The mechanics of
open source are simple. Someone comes up with a first version of the
software. He publishes the source code. Other people interested in
the program modify it – which they are able to do because they have
the source code – and send their modifications to him.
Modifications that he accepts go into the code base, the current
standard version that other programmers will work from. At the peak
of Linux development, Torvalds was updating the code base daily.

There are lots of
programmers, each working on the parts of the code that interest him,
so when someone reports a problem there is likely to be someone else
to whom its source and solution are obvious. “With enough eyeballs,
all bugs are shallow.”4
And with the source code open, bugs can be found and improvements
suggested by anyone interested.

Eric Raymond, a
prominent spokesman for the movement and the author of a
book about
it,
has pointed out that open source has its own set of norms and
property rights. There is nobody who can forbid you from copying or
modifying an open source program. But there is ownership in two other
and important senses.

Linus Torvalds owns
Linux. Eric Raymond owns Fetchmail. A committee owns Apache. Under an
open source license anyone is free to modify the code any way he
likes, provided that he makes the source code to his modified version
public, thus keeping it open source. But programmers want to all work
on the same code base so that each can take advantage of improvements
made by the others. If Torvalds rejects your improvements to Linux,
you are still free to use them – but don’t expect any help.
Everyone else will be working on his version. Thus ownership of a
project – the ability to decide what goes into the code base – is
a property right enforced entirely by private action.

As Eric Raymond has
pointed out, such ownership is controlled by rules similar to the
common law rules for owning land. Ownership of a project goes to the
person who creates it, homesteads that particular programming
opportunity by creating the first rough draft of the program. If he
loses interest he can transfer ownership to someone else. If he
abandons the program, someone else can claim it – publicly check to
be sure nobody else is currently in charge of it and then publicly
take charge of it himself. The equivalent in property law is adverse
possession, the legal rule under which, if you openly treat property
as yours for long enough and nobody objects, it is yours.

There is a second
form of ownership in open source – credit for your work. Each
project is accompanied by a file identifying the authors. Meddle with
that file – substitute in your name, thus claiming to be the author
of code someone else wrote – and your name in the open source
community is Mud. The same is true in the scholarly community. From
the standpoint of a professional scholar, copyright violation is a
peccadillo, theft someone else’s problem, plagiarism the ultimate
sin.

As this example
suggests, the open source movement is simply a new variation on the
system under which most of modern science was created. Programmers
create software; scholars create ideas. Ideas, like open source
programs, can be used by anyone. The source code, the evidence and
arguments on which the ideas are based, is public information. An
article that starts out “The following theory is true, but I won’t
tell you why” is unlikely to persuade many readers.

Scientific theories
do not have owners in quite the sense that open source projects do,
but at any given time in most fields there is considerable agreement
as to what the orthodox body of theory is. Scholars can choose to
ignore that consensus, but if they do, their work is unlikely to be
taken seriously. Apache’s owner is a committee. Arguably
neoclassical economics belongs to a somewhat larger committee. A
scholar can defy the orthodoxy to strike out on his own; some do.
Similarly, if you don’t like Linux, you are free to start your own
open source operating system project based on your variant of it.
Heretical ideas sometimes succeed and open source projects are
sometime successfully forked but, in both cases, the odds are against
it.

JIMMY
WALES’ IMPOSSIBLE SUCCESS

Few
projects seem less suited to the open source approach than writing an
encyclopedia. For it to be a success readers must rely on it, so a
mistake in one article casts doubt on others. The structure is
interdependent; an article on one subject may frequently need to
refer to articles on related subjects. Clearly the only way to do it
is with a central editorial board coordinating the whole thing and
hiring experts in various fields to write the articles. Indeed, I
have seen it argued that the reason for the decline of the
Encyclopedia Britannica from its high point early in the
twentieth century – the eleventh edition is widely regarded as a
classic – was the shift away from paying substantial sums for
articles, on the theory that the prestige of being published in the
Britannica was itself sufficient reward. That meant that they
were offering the smallest reward to the most qualified writers, the
experts whose prestige was unlikely to be raised by one more
encyclopedia article. If a little bit of reliance on volunteers,
status, nonpecuniary payments could weaken the market leader, surely
a complete reliance on such would be fatal to a new startup.

It did not turn out
that way. In 2001, Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia as an open-source,
online encyclopedia. Not only was everyone in the world invited to
contribute, everyone in the world got the last word – until someone
else showed up. When Linus Torvalds invited the world to write Linux
he retained control over the code base; changes he did not approve of
did not get included. Nobody has a corresponding power over
Wikipedia. With rare exceptions, any article can be edited anytime by
anyone.

Amazingly enough, it
works. Once in a while there is a minor flap when a group of true
believers tries to edit an article to make it support their view of
the world – only to discover that every time they make a change,
some wicked outsider undoes it. More often than one might expect, the
article evolves to a consensus, a statement of differing views that
both sides can agree on. However it works – I have not entirely
rejected the possibility of magic – the result six years later is a
massive reference work that, if not perfect, is arguably as reliable
as the encyclopedias produced by more conventional models,5
free for everyone to use and very widely used – almost certainly
more widely, online, than any competitor.

Market
and Hierarchy

One
of the odd features of a capitalist system is how socialist it is.
Firms interact with customers and other firms through the
decentralized machinery of trade. But firms themselves are miniature
socialist states, hierarchical organizations controlled, at least in
theory, by orders from above.

There is one crucial
difference between Microsoft and Stalin’s Russia. Microsoft’s
interactions with the rest of us are voluntary. It can get people to
work for it or buy its products only by offering them a deal they
prefer to all alternatives. I do not have to use the Windows
operating system unless I want to, and in fact I don’t and don’t.
Stalin did not face that constraint.

One implication is
that, however bad the public image of large corporations may be, they
exist because they serve human purposes. Employees work for them
because they find doing so a better life than working for themselves;
customers buy from them because they prefer doing so to making things
for themselves or buying from someone else. The disadvantages
associated with taking orders, working on other people’s projects,
depending for your reward on someone else’s evaluation of your
work, are balanced by advantages sufficient, for many people, to
outweigh them.6

The balance between
the advantages and disadvantages of large hierarchical organizations
depends in part on technologies associated with exchanging
information, arranging transactions, enforcing agreements, and the
like. As those technologies change, so does that balance. The easier
it is for a dispersed group of individuals to coordinate their
activities, the larger we would expect the role of decentralized
coordination, market rather than hierarchy, in the overall mix. This
has implications for how goods are likely to be produced in the
future – open source is a striking example. It also has
implications for political systems, social networks, and a wide range
of other human activities.

One example occurred
some years ago in connection with one of my hobbies, one at least
nominally run by a nonprofit corporation controlled by a
self-perpetuating board of directors. The board responded to problems
of growth by hiring a professional executive director. Acting
apparently on his advice, they announced, with no prior discussion,
that they had decided to double dues and to implement a controversial
proposal that had been previously dropped in response to an
overwhelmingly negative response by the membership.

If it had happened
ten years earlier there would have been grumbling but nothing more.
The corporation, after all, controlled all of the official channels
of communication. When its publication, included in the price of
membership, commented on the changes, the comments were distinctly
one-sided. Individual members, told by those in charge that the
changes were necessary to the health of the hobby, would for the most
part have put up with them.

That is not what
happened. The hobby in question had long had an active Usenet
newsgroup associated with it. Members included individuals with
professional qualifications, in a wide range of relevant areas,
arguably superior to those of the board members, the executive
director, or the corporation’s officers. Every time an argument was
raised in defense of the corporation’s policies, it was answered –
and at least some of the answers were persuasive. Only a minority of
those involved in the hobby read the newsgroup, but it was a large
enough minority to get the relevant arguments widely dispersed. And
email provided an easy way for dispersed members unhappy with the
changes to communicate, coordinate, act. The corporation’s board of
directors was self-perpetuating – membership in the organization
did not include a vote – but it was made up of volunteers, people
active in the hobby who were doing what they thought was right. They
discovered that quite a lot of others, including those they
respected, disagreed and were prepared to support their disagreement
with facts and arguments. By the time the dust cleared, every member
of the board of directors that made the decision, save those whose
terms had ended during the controversy, had resigned; their
replacements reversed the most unpopular of the decisions. It struck
me as an interesting example of the way in which the existence of the
internet had shifted the balance between center and periphery.7

For a more
commercial example, consider the announcement some years ago that Eli
Lilly had decided to subcontract part of its chemical research to the
world at large. Lilly created a subsidiary, InnoCentive LLC, to
maintain a web page listing chemistry problems that Lilly wanted
solved and the prices, up to $100,000, that they were offering for
the solutions. InnoCentive has invited other companies to use their
services to get their problems solved too. By late 2001, according to
a story in the Wall Street Journal, they had gotten “about
1,000 scientists from India, China, and elsewhere in the world” to
work on their problems.8
A number of other projects along similarly decentralized lines,
volunteer or commercial, either are in practice or have been proposed
– including one for open source development of drugs to deal with
third-world diseases.9

One problem
InnoCentive raises is that the people who are solving Lilly’s
problems may be doing so on someone else’s payroll. Consider a
chemist hired to work in an area related to one of the problems on
the list. He has an obvious temptation to slant the work in the
direction of the $100,000 prize, even if the result is to slow the
achievement of his employer’s objectives. A chemist paid by firm A
while working for firm B is likely to be caught – and fired – if
he does it in realspace. But if he combines a realspace job with
cyberspace moonlighting – still more if parts of the realspace job
are done by telecommuting from his home – the risks may be
substantially less. So one possibility if InnoCentive’s approach
catches on is a shift from paying for time to paying for results, at
least for some categories of skilled labor. In the limiting case,
employment vanishes and everyone becomes a subcontractor, selling
output rather than time.

Information
Warfare

So
far we have been considering ways in which the internet supports
decentralized forms of cooperation. It supports decentralized forms
of conflict as well. A communication system can be used as a weapon,
a way of misleading other people, creating forged evidence,
accomplishing your objectives at the expense of your opponents.
Consider two academic examples.

Case 1: The Tale
of the Four Little Pigs

The
year is 1995, the place Cornell University. Four freshmen have
compiled a collection of misogynist jokes entitled “75 Reasons Why
Women (Bitches) Should Not Have Freedom of Speech” and sent copies
to their friends. The collection reaches someone who finds it
offensive and proceeds to distribute it to many other people who
share that view, producing a firestorm of controversy inside and
outside the university. The central question is whether creating such
a list and using email to transmit it is an offense that ought to be
punished or a protected exercise of free speech.

Eventually, Cornell
announces its decision. The students have violated no university
rules and so will be subject to no penalties. They have, however,
recognized the error of their ways:

ext
… in addition to the public letter of apology they wrote
that was printed by the Cornell Daily Sun on November 3, 1995,
the students have offered to do the following:

Each of them will
attend the “Sex at 7:00” program sponsored by Cornell Advocates
for Rape Education (CARE) and the Health Education Office at Gannett
Health Center. This program deals with issues related to date and
acquaintance rape, as well as more general issues such as gender
roles, relationships, and communication.

Each of them has
committed to perform 50 hours of community service. If possible, they
will do the work at a nonprofit agency whose primary focus relates to
sexual assault, rape crisis, or similar issues. Recognizing that such
agencies may be reluctant to have these students work with them, the
students will perform the community service elsewhere if the first
option is not available.

The students will
meet with a group of senior Cornell administrators to apologize in
person and to express regret for their actions and for the
embarrassment and disruption caused to the University.

public
statement by Barbara L. Krause, Judicial Administrator

There are at least
two ways to interpret that outcome. One is that Ms. Krause is telling
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – Cornell
imposed no penalty on the students, they imposed an entirely
voluntary penalty on themselves. It seems a bit strange – but then,
Cornell is a rather unusual university.

The alternative
interpretation starts with the observation that university
administrators have a lot of ways of making life difficult for
students. By publicly announcing that the students had broken no
rules and were subject to no penalty, while privately making it clear
to the students that if they planned to remain at Cornell they would
be well advised to “voluntarily” penalize themselves, Cornell
engaged in a successful act of hypocrisy. They publicly maintained
their commitment to free speech while covertly punishing students for
what they said.

Someone who
preferred the second interpretation thought up a novel way of
supporting it. An email went out during Thanksgiving break to
thousands of Cornell students, staff, and faculty – 21,132 of them
according to its authors.

–––––––––––––––

CONFIDENTIAL

I would like to extend my
heartfelt thanks to the many faculty members who advised me regarding
the unfortunate matter of the “75 Reasons” letter that was
circulated via electronic mail. Your recommendations for dealing with
the foul-mouthed “four little pigs” (as I think of them) who
circulated this filth was both apposite and prudent.

Now that we have had time to
evaluate the media response, I think we can congratulate ourselves on
a strategy that was not only successful in defusing the scandal, but
has actually enhanced the reputation of the university as a sanctuary
for those who believe that “free speech” is a relative term that
must be understood to imply acceptable limits of decency and
restraint – with quick and severe punishment for those who go
beyond those limits and disseminate socially unacceptable sexist
slurs.

I am especially pleased to
report that the perpetrators of this disgusting screed have been
suitably humiliated and silenced, without any outward indication that
they were in fact disciplined by us. Clearly, it is to our advantage
to place malefactors in a position where they must CENSOR THEMSELVES,
rather than allow the impression that we are censoring them.

…

Yours sincerely

Barbara L. Krause Judicial
Administrator

–––––––––––––––

The letter was not,
of course, actually written by Barbara Krause – as anyone attentive
enough to check the email address could have figured out. It was
written, and sent, by an anonymous group calling themselves OFFAL –
Online Freedom Fighters Anarchist Liberation.
The letter was a satire, and an effective one, giving a believable
and unattractive picture of what its authors suspected Ms. Krause’s
real views were. It was also a fraud – some readers would never
realize that she was not the real author. In both forms it provided
propaganda for its authors’ view of what had really happened.

But it did more than
that. Email is not only easily distributed, it is easily answered.
Some recipients not only believed the letter, they agreed with it and
said so. Since OFFAL had used, not Ms. Krause’s email address, but
an email address that they controlled, those answers went back to
them. OFFAL produced a second email, containing the original forgery,
an explanation of what they were doing, and a selection of responses.

I happen to support your
actions and the resolution of this incident, but put into the wrong
hands, this memo could perhaps be used against you.

–--

Thank god you sent this memo –
something with a little anger and fire – something that speaks to
the emotion and not just the legalities. I hope you are right in
stating that what went on behind the scenes was truly humiliating for
“them.”

–--

I agree with what your memo
states about the “four little pigs” (students who embarrassed the
entire Cornell community), but I don’t think I was one of the
people really intended for your confidential memo. … Great Job in
the handling of a most sensitive issue.

-–-

The authors of the list have
received richly -deserved humiliation

Their summary:

We believe that ridicule is a
more powerful weapon than bombs or death threats. And we believe that
the Internet is the most powerful system ever invented for channeling
grass-roots protests and public opinion in the face of petty tyrants
who seek to impose their constipated values on everyday citizens who
merely want to enjoy their constitutionally protected liberties.

It is hard not to
have some sympathy for the perpetrators. They were making a
defensible argument, although I am not certain it was a correct one,
and making it in an ingenious and effective way. But at the same time
they, like the purveyors of other sorts of propaganda, were combining
a legitimate argument with a dishonest one, and it was the latter
that depended on their ingenious use of modern communications
technology.

The correct point
was that Cornell’s actions could plausibly be interpreted as
hypocritical – attacking free speech while pretending to support
it. The dishonest argument was the implication that the responses
they received provided support for that interpretation. The eight
replies that OFFAL selected consisted of six supporting the original
email, one criticizing it, one doing neither. If that were a random
selection of responses, it would be impressive evidence for their
view of what had happened – but we have no reason to think the
selection was random. All it showed was that about half a dozen
people out of more than 20,000 supported the idea of covert
punishment, which tells us very little about whether that was what
was really happening.

What I find
interesting about the incident is that it demonstrates a form of
information warfare made practical by the nature of the net – very
low transaction costs, anonymity, no face-to-face contact. Considered
as parody, it could have been done with old technology. As fraud, a
way of tricking people into revealing their true beliefs by
pretending that they were revealing them to someone who shared them,
it could have been done with old technology, although not as easily.
But as mass production fraud, a way of fooling thousands of people in
order to get a few of them to reveal their true beliefs, it depended
on the existence of email.

Some years ago on a
Usenet group, I read the following message:

I believe that it is okay to
have sex before marriage unlike some people. This way you can
expirence different types of sex and find the right man or woman who
satifies you in bed. If you wait until marriage then what if your
mate can not satisfy you, then you are stuck with him. Please write
me and give me your thoughts on this. You can also tell me about some
of your ways to excite a woman because I have not yet found the right
man to satisfy me.

It
occurred to me that what I was observing might be a commercial
variant of the OFFAL tactic. The message is read by thousands,
perhaps tens of thousands, of men. A hundred or so take up the
implied offer and email responses. They get suitably enticing emails
in response – the same emails for all of them, with only the names
changed. They continue the correspondence. Eventually they receive a
request for fifty dollars – and a threat to pass on the
correspondence to the man’s wife if the money is not paid. The ones
who are not married ignore it; some of the married ones pay. The
responsible party has obtained $1,000 or so at a cost very close to
zero. Mass production blackmail.10

One
of my students suggested a simpler explanation. The name and email
address attached to the message belonged not to the sender but to
someone the sender disliked. Whether or not he was correct, that form
of information warfare has been used frequently enough online to have
acquired its own nickname: “A Joe
job.” It is not a new technique –
the classical version is a phone number on the wall of a men’s
room. But the net greatly expands the audience.

A
Sad Story

The
following story is true; names and details have been changed to
protect the innocent.

SiliconTech is an
institution of higher education where the students regard Cornell,
OFFAL and all, as barely one step above the Stone Age. If they ever
have a course in advanced computer intrusion – for all I know they
do – there will be no problem finding qualified students.

Alpha, Beta, and
Gamma were graduate students at ST. All three came from a third-world
country that, in the spirit of this exercise, I will call Sparta.
Alpha and Beta were a couple for most of a year, at one point
planning to get married. That ended when Beta told Alpha that she no
longer wanted to be his girlfriend. Over the following months Alpha
attempted, unsuccessfully, to get her back.

Eventually the two
met at a social event held by the Spartan Student Association; in the
course of the event, Alpha learned that Beta was now living with
Gamma. This resulted in a heated discussion among the three of
them; there were no outside witnesses and the participants later
disagreed about what was said. Alpha’s version is that he
threatened to tell other members of the Spartan community at ST
things that would damage the reputation of Beta and her family.
Sparta is a sexually conservative and politically oppressive society,
so it is at least possible that spreading such information would have
had serious consequences. Beta and Gamma’s version is that Alpha
threatened to buy a gun and have a duel with Gamma.

Later that evening,
someone used Alpha’s account on the computer he did his research on
to log onto another university machine and from that machine forge an
obscene email to Beta that purported to come from Gamma. During the
process the same person made use of Alpha’s account on a university
supercomputer. A day or so later, Beta and Gamma complained about the
forged email to the ST computer organization, which traced it to
Alpha’s machine, disabled his account on their machine, and left
him a message. Alpha, believing (by his account) that Beta and Gamma
had done something to get him in trouble with the university, sent an
email to Gamma telling him that he would have to help Beta with her
research, since Alpha would no longer be responsible for doing so.

The next day, a
threatening email was sent from Alpha’s account on his research
computer to Gamma. Beta and Gamma took the matter to the ST
authorities. According to their account, Alpha had:

Harassed
Beta since they broke up, making her life miserable and
keeping her from doing her research.

Showed
her a gun permit he had and told her he was buying a gun.

Threatened
to kill her.

Threatened
to have a duel with Gamma.

They presented the
authorities with copies of four emails – the three described so
far, plus an earlier one sent at the time of the original breakup.
According to Alpha, two of them were altered versions of emails that
he had sent, two he had never seen before.

Two days later, Beta
and Gamma went to the local police with the same account plus an
accusation that, back when Alpha and Beta were still a couple, he had
attempted to rape her. Alpha was arrested on charges of felony
harassment and terrorism, with bail set at more than $100,000. He
spent the next five and half months in jail under quite unpleasant
circumstances. The trial took two weeks; the jury then took three
hours to find Alpha innocent of all charges. He was released. ST
proceeded to have its own trial of Alpha on charges of sexual
harassment. They found him guilty and expelled him.

When I first became
interested in the case – because it involved issues of identity and
email evidence in a population technologically a decade or two ahead
of the rest of the world – I got in touch with the ST attorney
involved. According to her account, the situation was clear. Computer
evidence proved that the obscene and threatening emails had
ultimately originated on Alpha’s account, to which only he had the
password, having changed it after his breakup with Beta. While the
jury may have acquitted him on the grounds that he did not actually
have a gun, Alpha was clearly guilty of offenses against (at least)
ST rules.

I then succeeded in
reaching both Alpha’s attorney and a faculty member sympathetic to
Alpha who had been involved in the controversy. From them I learned a
few facts that the ST attorney had omitted.

All of Alpha’s accounts used the same
password. Prior to the breakup with Beta, the password had been “Beta.”
Afterwards, it was Alpha’s mother’s maiden name.

According to the other graduate students who
worked with Alpha, and contrary to Beta’s sworn testimony, the two had
remained friends after the breakup and Alpha had continued to help Beta
do her research on his computer account. Hence it is almost certain
that Beta knew the new password. Hence she, or Gamma, or Gamma’s older
brother, a professional systems manager who happened to be in town when
the incidents occurred, could have accessed the accounts and done all
of the things that Alpha was accused of doing.

The “attempted rape” was supposed to have
happened early in their relationship. According to Beta’s own testimony
at trial, she subsequently took a trip alone with him during which they
shared a bed. According to other witnesses, they routinely spent
weekends together for some months after the purported attempt.

In the course of the trial there was evidence
that many of the statements made by Beta and Gamma were false. In
particular, Beta claimed never to have been in Alpha’s office during
the two months after the breakup (relevant because of the password
issue); other occupants of the office testified that she had been there
repeatedly. Beta claimed to have been shown Alpha’s gun permit; the
police testified that he did not have one.

One of the emails supposedly forged by Alpha
had been created at a time when he not only had an alibi – he was in a
meeting with two faculty members – but had an alibi he could not have
anticipated having, hence could not have prepared for by somehow
programming the computer to do things when he was not present.

The ST hearing was conducted by a faculty
member who had told various other people that Alpha was guilty and ST
should get rid of him before he did something that they might be liable
for. Under existing school policy, the defendant was entitled to veto
suggested members of the committee. Alpha attempted to veto the
chairman and was ignored. According to my informant, the hearing was
heavily biased, with restrictions by the committee on the introduction
of evidence and arguments favorable to Alpha.

During the time Alpha was in jail awaiting
trial, his friends tried to get bail lowered. Beta and Gamma
energetically and successfully opposed the attempt, tried to pressure
other members of the Spartan community at ST not to testify in Alpha’s
favor, and even put together a booklet containing not only material
about Alpha but stories from online sources about Spartan students
killing lovers or professors.

Two different
accounts of what actually happened are consistent with the evidence.
One, the account pushed by Beta and Gamma and accepted by ST, makes
Alpha the guilty party and explains the evidence that Beta and Gamma
were lying about some of the details as a combination of
exaggeration, innocent error, and perjury by witnesses friendly to
Alpha. The other, the account accepted by at least some of Alpha’s
supporters, makes Beta and Gamma the guilty parties and ST at the
least culpably negligent. On that version, Beta and Gamma conspired
to frame Alpha for offenses he had not committed, presumably as a
preemptive strike against his threat to release true but damaging
information about Beta – once he was in jail, who would believe
him? They succeeded to the extent of getting him locked up for five
and a half months, beaten in jail by fellow prisoners, costing him
and his friends some $20,000 in legal expenses, and ultimately
getting him expelled.

I favor the second
account, in part because I think it is clear that the ST attorney I
originally spoke with was deliberately trying to mislead me by
concealing facts that not only were relevant but directly
contradicted the arguments she was making. I am suspicious of people
who lie to me. On the other hand, attorneys, even attorneys for
academic institutions, are hired to serve the interest of their
clients, not to reveal truth to curious academics, so even if she
believed Alpha was guilty she might have preferred to conceal the
evidence that he was not. For my present purposes what is interesting
is not which side was guilty but the fact that either side could have
been, and the problems that fact raises for the world that they were,
and we will be, living in.

Lessons

Women
have simple tastes. They can take pleasure in the conversation of
babes in arms and men in love.

H.L. Mencken, In
Defense of Women

Online
communication, in this case email, normally carries identification
that, unlike one’s face, can readily be forged. The Cornell case
demonstrated one way in which that fact could be used: to extract
unguarded statements from somebody by masquerading as someone he has
reason to trust. This case, on one interpretation, demonstrates
another: to injure someone by persuading third parties that he said
things he in fact did not say.

The obvious solution
is some way of knowing who sent what message. The headers of an email
are supposed to provide that information. As these cases both
demonstrate, they do not do it very well. On the simplest
interpretation of the events at ST, Alpha used a procedure known to
practically everyone in that precocious community to send a message
to Beta that purported to come from Gamma. On the alternative
interpretation, Beta or Gamma masqueraded as Alpha (accessing his
account with his password) in order to send a message to Beta that
purported to come from Gamma – and thus get Alpha blamed for doing
so.

ST provided a second
level of protection – passwords. The passwords were chosen by the
user, hence in many cases easy to guess; users tend to select
passwords that they can remember. And even if they had been hard to
guess, one user can always tell another his password. However
elaborate the security protecting Alpha’s control over his own
identification, up to and including the use of digital signatures, it
could not protect him against betrayal by himself. Alpha was in love
with Beta, and men in love are notoriously imprudent.

Or perhaps it could.
One possible solution is the use of biometrics, identification
linked to physical characteristics such as fingerprints or retinal
patterns. If ST had been twenty years ahead of the rest of us instead
of only ten, they might have equipped their computers with scanners
that checked the users’ fingerprints and retinas before letting
them sign on. Even a man in love is unlikely to give away his
retinas. With that system, we would know which party was guilty.
Provided, of course, that none of the students at SiliconTech, the
cream of the world’s technologically precocious young minds,
figured out how to trick the biometric scanners or hack the software
controlling them.

Even if the system
works, it has some obvious disadvantages. In order to prevent someone
from editing a real email he has received and then presenting the
edited version as the original – what Alpha claims that Beta and
Gamma did – the system must keep records of all email that passes
through it. Many users may find that objectionable on the grounds of
privacy – although there are possible technological ways around
that problem.11And the requirement of
biometric identification eliminates not only
forged identity but anonymity as well – which arguably could have a
chilling effect on free speech.

So far I have
implicitly assumed a single computer network with a single owner,
like the one at Silicon Tech. With a decentralized network such as
the Internet, creating a system of unforgeable identity becomes an
even harder challenge. It can be done via digital signatures, but
only if the potential victims are willing to take the necessary
precautions to keep other people from getting access to their private
keys. Biometric identification, even if it becomes entirely reliable,
is still vulnerable to the user who inserts additional hardware or
software between the scanner and the computer of his own system and
uses it to lie to the computer about what the scanner saw.

OPEN
SOURCE CRIME CONTROL

A
few years ago, a college student named Jason Eric Smith sold a Mac
laptop and some accessories on eBay and sent it COD to the buyer. The
buyer paid with a $2,900 cashier’s check that turned out to be
forged. Jason, understandably upset, “posted my tale of woe and
call for assistance on every Mac bulletin board I could think of”
and received more than 100 responses offering help and/or
oral support, one of which provided a pointer to an online private
investigator who, from the buyer’s cell phone number, was able to
get his real name and landline phone number. Attempts to interest the
Chicago police department, the FBI, and the Secret Service were
unsuccessful – “will call you back later” from the first, “not
large enough to interest” us from the others.

Eventually Jason got
an email response from another seller who had been the victim of the
same buyer and knew of the existence of others. Unable to get law
enforcement interested, he decided on a little private entrapment,
set up an auction on eBay of the same computer under his girlfriend’s
name, and within three hours received an offer – from the same
buyer. Fellow Mac users in Chicago provided additional information
about the neighborhood, which turned out to be not in the city at all
but in the suburb of Markham. He called the Markham police and this
time found an officer enthusiastically interested in catching crooks.
The police officer, dressed in a FedEx uniform, made the delivery and
arrested the criminal with more than $10,000 in bogus checks in his
possession.

The story
got a good deal of news coverage at the time, but I missed it. The
reason I know about it is that, when looking for material for this
part of the chapter, I put a post
on my blog asking for examples of open source crime control. The next
day I had responses with links to several stories,12
including Jason’s. I found his story the same way he found his
criminal.

A similar pattern
can be seen in a number of more recent cases. One
involved stamp collectors swindled by someone who bought low-quality
stamps, “improved them,” and then resold the altered versions for
higher prices. The victims succeeded in persuading eBay to join with
them and shut down those of the swindler’s accounts that could be
identified. Total losses were apparently more than $1,000,000. One of
the private investigators was a retired FBI agent and they succeeded
in identifying the man responsible, but as of the most recent story I
have seen on the case they have not yet succeeded in getting law
enforcement to act; unfortunately, this swindler doesn’t live in
Markham.

The existence of the
internet facilitates open source law enforcement by victims in two
ways. It makes it easier for a crime victim to get information just
as it makes it easier for an amateur economist or historian to get
information. And it makes it much easier for victims to find each
other, pool their information, and work together to find the
criminal. Only the final stage of the process requires the
intervention of professionals paid to catch criminals.

Or perhaps not even
the final stage. One recent news story
described tactics organized online for harassing email scammers,
using tactics rather like their own. And a decentralized
approach can also be applied to the problem of identifying and
filtering out spam, a form of enforcement entirely legal and entirely
outside the legal system.

All of which raises
the interesting question of whether there are opportunities for open
source crime as well as open source crime control. If any occur to me
I will keep them to myself.

Footnotes

1 For a counterexample, consider Adam
Smith, who
had clearly read an enormous amount before writing The Wealth of
Nations.

3 The Linux kernel is usually used with
utilities and libraries from the GNU operating system, so the
combination is more precisely, but less conveniently, referred to as GNU/Linux.
Readers may be interested in an essay
on the difference between open software and free software by Richard
Stallman, who originated the Free Software Foundation and the GNU
project.

11 One could use a one-way hashing
algorithm to produce a message digest of each message and store that
instead of the complete message. The message digest cannot be used to
reconstruct the message but can be used to check that it has not been
changed, by seeing if it still hashes to the same digest.

12 The others can be found in the comments
to my blog
and in the account
of a U.K. Case.